New Adventure Path

The gaming group is starting on Rise of the Runelords today. Finally, yay! We've been trying to play this for about a year or two. Two many chaotic life events got in the way. I'm playing a paladin.

Can't remember anyone ever playing a paladin in a game I ran. People just don't really like playing a guy who can't torture or maim for information. I think it will be an interesting experience. Force me to role play. At least enough to convince the rest of the party to hold back on the usual dungeoneering atrocities.

I think my initiative is low enough that when fights go down, it won't be me who throws the first blow. Think this will help with some moral dilemmas. Also, the ability to detect evil will help me wade through ethical conundrums.

Can't wait to shove my Great sword down a goblins throat. That is totally acceptable good guy behavior.

I can see Russia from my house!

I was watching the Saturday night live Thursday special thing, and Alaska came up. Of course it did. Which reminded me of the boxed set of Twilight 2000 I picked up at a flea market five or six years ago. Contained within were the original rules, a few issues of Challenger, some modules, vehicle guides for Soviets and NATO, and a copy of the Indianapolis Star from November 8, 1987. This is why.

A map of the "Arctic Chessboard". Does it get cooler than hovercraft, frost bite, and killing Russians to keep America safe?

WOLVERINES!

There are few things as manly and dorky at the same time as playing Twilight 2000. Most RPG's, yeah, girls can get into them. Not Twilight, a gun-porn game of shooting and stabbing and looting.

Magic Abuser

I'm playing a wizard in ol' Jum-Jums game. What I have learned so far, is wizards shoot from the hip with the wands. Like pointy hatted gunslingers, they make with the wand action. Zero level spells are for usage against NPCs that annoy you. Those area affect damage spells that annoy other classes will destroy a mage. Having a limited spell book is more appealing to me than having to sift through the entire spell list every time I pick spells. Ignore your familiar, and hopefully the DM will too. You can never have too many scrolls.

The secrets of the spirit world unveiled for the first time!

This supplement came out when AD&D was seriously winding down. White Wolf was kicking their ass without a doubt. It introduced the spirit world, and three classes that gained their power from it. Saying three new classes was a little misleading, it was more like one new class, three kits.

The new classes were a little like priests, but when they chose spells for their spell slots, it was permanent. If they wanted to switch out a spell it would offend their patron spirit. Most of the spells dealt exclusively with spirits. One gave the shaman the ability to bind spirits into fetishes.

Pretty pointless supplement. In the DM only section, it is revealed that the spirit world doesn't exist. It's all in the heads of the shaman. Stupid. Integrating this into a running campaign would assuredly end it. Starting a new campaign based on this would turn into one guy is the hero, everyone else follows him around as he reads omens and barters with ancestors.

More Parlainth

Last post really felt incomplete, so I'm gonna revisit the boxed set. Still strong smell in it, I'm hoping the more I open it, the better it will smell. The smell I would prefer is rotting paper, like the funk given off by the 1st ed. AD&D books. Maybe even the sweet ink smell that books with lots of color illustrations seem to emanate.

The box contains two punch out card sheets of monsters and magic items detailed in the enclosed campaign book. Awesome idea, I'm glad Paizo is running with this now. The one pictured on the left is the Butterspider Box. It's a beat up rusty tin box with a lump of lard in the shape of a wolfspider inside of it. When you touch the spider, you heal, and it melts. This is one of my favorite magic items ever. That is some flavor right there (lard flavor at least). Makes a healing potion look lazy and weak. The illustration doesn't make the box look all beat up. It makes it look like a eldrich rune encrusted obvious artifact. The real shape of it makes it look like some sort of random flea market junk. Something a compulsive hoarder would store with all of their mason jars and christmas cards.

The Forgotten City

About seven or eight years ago, I stumbled onto this boxed set at a flea market. For a short span of time, maybe about a summer, I found a big stack of loot there. The blue cover Holmes D&D, Twilight 2000 boxed set, a D&D calendar from like 1981, a couple of issues of dragon from the early eighties, and this boxed set. The stall selling it had like ten copies of it. Awesome.

I ran Earthdawn, maybe four to six times. Didn't get a chance to use anything from this set. I'm pretty sure I found it near the end of my interest in said campaign. It is a pretty sweet box of goodies though. Nice almost sandbox style setting. Rough maps, all sorts of adventure seeds. I really should have read through it again if I was going to blog about it I guess. Huh. Inside of it I have typed notes of all the Earthdawn adventures I ran in the mini campaign. Also in there is the stale smell of smoke. I used to be a smoker, quit about a year ago, so now when ever I open a book or boxed set that I haven't touched in a while, I get a whiff of old smoke. It's kind of gross.

Splatta!

The sunday D&D game I'm playing in just descended into a gore fest. Now if boobies are inappropriate in gaming, gore is totally kosher. How can you have a game that 75% of the time involves people chopping away at each other with swords and not have a little viscerata? The grinding and chopping was all happening to townsfolk, so it was especially brutal. Gore is blunted in gaming, and wisely so, because if your axe can lop off slabs of ogre flesh, it stands to reason that his cleaver will do the same to you. No player wants to get maimed in every fight.

Gurps goblins used nasty injuries, but in that game, your characters are virtually unkillable. The injuries would just make your phobic sickly alchoholic goblin more miserable. Seems with healing spells, chopping the hell out of players would be ok. The cure light would just stick that flapping chunk of flesh back on you.

Ye Ole Teat Bar

I'm playing in a new game on sunday nights, good times. Still trying to get a handle on the personality of my Mwambi (African) tribesman magic user, Witch Man. Just talking in third person all the time doesn't seem like a deep enough characterization, but meh, I'll get the hang of it eventually.

During the scenario, it became obvious to me that in fantasy towns and fairs there is an abundance of sex workers. Brothels, dancing girls, street walkers, saucy barmaids, willing succubus's, all kinds of naughty girls. In addition to this, I just saw the south park episode Major Boobage. Ahh, one of the hidden ingredients to perfect fantasy. Puerile adolescent nudity and violence. Korgoth of Barbaria, Heavy Metal, Frazetta, Nekkid titty demons in the monster manual, all these reflect this naughty piece of the fantasy puzzle.

Try running naughty things in your game though. It's pervy as hell. For the most part, players are going to be guys. As much as they like boobies and sex scenes, they don't really want their buddies to think them up for them and then tell them about it around a table. I guess it is sexist as well, to plaster manuals and scenarios in boobirific art. Still, I'm thinking the best fantasy has awesome boobage and mysterious super science.

Less than once a month!

I've been far too lazy to post, this is a pretty common occurrence so it really shouldn't raise any eyebrows. Anyway, as far as gaming goes, I've got mixed feelings on how soon Shackled City is going to be over. On the one hand, I'm a little dissapointed I couldn't meet my personal goal of finishing it by summer, setting back further the much anticipated (at least by me!) start of Rise of the Runelords. On the other side, kinda glad it's dragging out, because I've really enjoy trying to kill Krunk, Midori, and Silverswift.

Things I am diddling with:

A Subsector of Traveller. Something I started in september, and have slowly been adding to over the past nine months. Tedious, mind numbing at times, but also super fascinating. Trying to make each world stand out, when there are dozens in a system, pretty damn hard. Eventually it will be to the point where I can drop players in on a planet and have the fun explode out from behind the screen by the gallon!

Omega World. From the polyhedron article that I borrowed, and will give back, because I just downloaded the pdf. Making a ruin crawl and such, drawing up maps, slapping together monsters and npc's. Planning on adapting Legions of Gold to it next, for a micro campaign (four to eight sessions tops).

4.0 Random Dungeon. Love randomizing dungeons, and this one set of tables really breathes life into my random dungeonizing. Pretty much the only table I use on a regular basis is the Gygax ones from the DMG, so using these makes me happier. No 45 degree angle tunnels, curved tunnels, tunnels that smack into each other, x intersections, all that poop. Made up 3 levels of my 4.0 MEGADUNGEON! so far, it has way too many goblins in it for my tastes, gonna have to go back in there and change them into robot dogs or something.

Tarry Wisdom

Another critter the Champions fought was a farastu (tarry) demodand. That's the scrawny little critter on the left. Four of 'em exploded outta some zombies. Not much of a challenge, but sure evokes some nasty imagery, very Dead Alive.

Not a big fan of demodand, just kinda feel stuck on, because they needed neutral evil demon/devils. They excrete yuckiness, and in the farastu's case, it is tar. This tar makes weapons stick to them unless a relatively easy save is made, all saves were made so I couldn't use these scummy little boogers to take away some weapons.

In second edition, when they didn't want to call fiendish critters demons and devils, they changed demodand's name to ghereleth's. The decision to try to disguise demons and devils always pissed me off. In a weird way, the belief that D&D was devil worship gave it a little more credibility. Something you might play with metal heads, instead of a hobby exclusively enjoyed by dorks.